Renesas Electronics designs processors for autonomous cars

Many automakers have already announced autonomous vehicles, and some may have plans for such plans. There will be a great demand for technologies that enable self-drive and the like to deliver to the market Renesas Electronics, which has just started sending samples of its latest R-Car H3 SoC processor.

The system was designed to support advanced vehicle control systems and is one of the first third-generation R-Car family of processors to be built primarily for in-vehicle information systems. The manufacturer hopes that it will be put into use by 2020, when the availability of semi-autonomous vehicles will increase.

The R-Car H3 SoC supports the ADAS (advanced driver support system), as well as autonomous driving features such as object recognition, situational assessment, and task execution required in self-guided vehicles.

The system deals with processing data from a whole range of servers and communication devices such as on-board cameras and radar tracking the route ahead of the vehicle. Thanks to its high computing power, the efficiency of the entire system is considerably increased. The efficient data processing is also very important for the HMI (human-machine interface) because it is important for road vehicles to display driving data and information related to the operation of all vehicle systems.

The R-Car H3 is based on eight 64-bit ARM cores (four Cortex-A57 cores and four Cortex A53 cores), and its performance is 60 percent higher than the R-Car H2. Thanks to the programmable parallel core IMP-X5, 300% of data processing capabilities have also been improved.